


Underside Like It's 1920 Again

by TopHat



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe - Noir, F/F, F/M, Holidays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-02-22 04:13:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22076080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TopHat/pseuds/TopHat
Summary: The Noir!AU for the Undersiders, with everyone a lot more grown up and a lot more classic than canon.
Relationships: Alec | Regent/Aisha Laborn | Imp, Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver/Lisa Wilbourn | Tattletale
Comments: 5
Kudos: 69





	1. Sugar We're Going Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Best read with the Postmodern Jukebox cover of "Sugar We're Going Down" playing in the background.

_“Am I more than you bargained for... yet?”_

Lisa hated mob contracts. She hated them almost as much as she hated working for cops, or Cauldron, or any of the other players who could actually pay the bills. She hated the aspect of being a PI which meant you occasionally had to take a job, no matter how little you liked it, and all the loss of control that went with that. She hated the fact that she had a stomach which ached when there wasn’t enough food, a head that split with pain all the alcohol in the world couldn’t drown, and an urge to know which had gotten her in too deep.

_“I’ve been dying to tell you anything you wanna hear..._

“Another?” Lloyd asked, pausing in front of her.

Lisa smiled, shoving the pile of tells, the unconscious come-ons, the psychoanalysis bullshit that never turned out wrong but wasn’t always true to the back of her mind, and pushed her highball away. “I’m out for the night. Thanks though, and tell the wife I said hi.”

“I’ll be sure to do that, Miss Wilbourn.” Lloyd didn’t press further, because in Somer’s Rock bartenders didn’t last long if they were nosey. They also tended to have the drink mixing capacity of a meat grinder, which made Lloyd special enough that Lisa made a point of slipping him an extra quarter when she could. That wasn’t often, but it also wasn’t so infrequent that she thought the magical refills on her Manhattans were just good moods and serendipity.

Lisa figures she was little more than a marginally less irritating customer, but when things got bad Lloyd was a friend.

_‘Cause that’s just who I am this week.”_

She stood up, taking light wave of dizziness with the ease of boxer, and started for the back room. Lisa had kept her new team waiting for long enough, and while it wasn’t strictly-speaking good form to arrive late she’s found the good will from arriving on time to only the things which mattered well worth the initial barrage of irritation.

After nodding to Dave the Bouncer, taking a left into the ladies’ room, and pressing through the secret passage in the perpetually-out-of-order stall, Lisa became Tattletale.

_“Lie in the grass, next to the... mausoleum.”_

It was a lot of small things. A slightly nicer suit, made of fabric too durable to be normal. Weapons, ballistic and edged, hidden where it would take an invasively good search to find. A hat, under which her hair went, black with a purple band, one which always made her think of Alice.

The mask was the last part. Big, purple, and understated, like the Mercedes Coil drove. Not her style, but the thing had grown on her, and settling it on her face felt almost soothing these days. A facade of delayed accountability, a shield against the worst of the things which could be thrown her way, and a promise that she could get out if things really got out of hand. Drop the purple, pick a different color, switch states, and the status quo would resume, albeit somewhere without bartenders she knew. Even without that it was understood that Tattletale was a free agent, and that nothing she did was personal, just part of the game. Gangs would come and go, empires would rise and fall, and throughout it all Tattletale would endure, a chattering figure atop the waves of unrest, riding the storms of conflict into ever-more obscure secrets. A modern-day cross between Odesseuss and Sherlock Holmes.

That or she’s get shot by a cop during a bank robbery and die, but you couldn’t get held up on things like that if you wanted to really know what was going on.

_“I’m just a notch in your bedpost…_

Preparations complete, Lisa stepped into the meeting room. “So then, who am I working with tonight?”

_”But you’re just a line in a song.”_

Masks were fucked-up as a rule. Lisa liked to think she represented the more stable end of the bell curve, but even then she wouldn’t necessarily approach Tattletale alone a bar. Sometimes it was a nonverbal get-the-fuck-away-from-me field, the sort of thign Lisa also felt around the really good knifers, no power required, and which spilled from the slim man in a white dress shirt and renissance mask like a wellspring of wrong. Sometimes it was a literal black mist floating around a better-than-six-foot bruiser who looked like his civ life involved hauling dead cows to the meat packing factories on his own, a none-too-subtle display of power. Sometimes it was a trio of mean-looking dogs that didn’t have leashes surrounding a thick-set girl wearing a parka during a New York summer, her blockish jaw twisted into a grimace which could’ve curdled milk.

And sometimes it was a literal fucking biblical plague.

“I’m sorry, I don’t work with monsters,” Lisa said, doing her best to remain straight-faced while introducing herself to a pillar of locus and centipedes and scorpions and spiders and _Jesus Christ would she just stop with the insects and arthropods!?_ “Who are you?”

The buzzing, humming, and crawling intensified for a moment, then began draining away, revealing a tall, slim woman, decked out in a grey bodysuit, shawl, and web belt, with black, curly hair fountaining out from the back of her head and down to her waist. Lisa couldn’t see her face past the yellow-lensed mask, and the overall impression was that of a person who wanted to be taken seriously but didn’t know how and thus defaulted to the most dangerous thing she could, and to hell with the consequences.

_“Drop a heart, break a name..._

**“Call me Skitter.”** It took a second for Lisa to realize the words came from the swarm, not the woman, and a second longer to realize that they weren’t laced with fury. **“Sorry. I forget about them.”**

Lisa shrugged nonchalantly (there was no easier way to lose face than to show weakness in front of other masks) and sat down at the table, choosing to believe that there was nothing under her when she settled into the chair. “Okay, so now that we’ve all engaged in the obligatory dick-measuring contest, would anyone like to tell me why we’re all here?”

**“A bank robbery. Grue’s the official leader, all promissory notes are bought at eighty percent value, and easy-liquidatable valuables are fenced for no fee. We were told—”**

“Okay, I’m going to have to stop you right there,” Lisa interrupted, shaking her head with as much disdain as she could. Her power told her that the bug-girl put on a scary facade, but underneath it genuinely didn’t want to hurt anyone. That meant taking the inch of automatic difference and spinning into a mile of control, then hoping the rest of the person behind her power-assisted first impressions more or less reflected the surface. “The whole ‘speak through the creepy swarm of bugs’ thing? That’s going to stop. Right now. I don’t work with creeps, and if you keep giving me serial killer vibes I’m gone.”

“If you’re against serial killers, we might have a problem,” the masked man said, leaning his chair onto its back legs.

Lisa immediately started doing the mental math on how long it would take for her to discreetly draw a gun, then realized that she didn’t have a chance in hell.

More pressing was that the dog-woman started growling, and her three dogs with her. “Then get gone.”

_“We’re always sleeping in, sleeping for the wrong team..._

_**Bang!** _

Once he had everyone’s attention Grue pulled his hand back from the table, the surface of which had grown a new dent. “Skitter, quit the bugs. Bitch, shut the fuck up. Tattletale, play nice. Regent...”

Regent shrugged, falling forward with a quiet _click_ where the front legs of his chair hit the ground. “I’ll play nice too, Daddy Grue.”

“Don’t fucking call me that.” The expletive aside, Lisa could feel the tension draining out of the air. Grievances heard, conflict resolved, and she was up one or two points on Skitter and more than a little information on the group dynamic. Specifically, she now knew that everyone hated everyone else, and that it was in her best interest to get the hell out of the fucked-up group dynamic before 

(Except for Skitter, who thought everyone else hated more than they actually did, but was too busy feeling sorry for herself to hate anyone.)

_“We're going down, down in an earlier round_

As they hashed out the details of when to meet for the robbery, shares of the loot, and threw around death threats like anyone in the room was less than perfectly capable of pulling it off, Lisa decided that as soon as she got her share she was out. As a rule she worked alone, and the benefits of having additional masked muscled had never yet outweighed the risks. Basic math told her that the more people who were involved in the job, the lower the reward had to be in order to justify snitching, and the more interpersonal connections which needed managing, the greater the chance that someone stepped on exactly the wrong memory and the whole thing went up in flames.

It had taken more than a month for Lisa’s eyebrows to grow back.

_“And Sugar, we're going down swinging_

“Hey.”

Only nerves of steel kept Lisa from going for her gun. When she turned around, Skitter was standing just more than an arm’s length away, as impersonal and terrifying as a mafioso sporting his mother’s nylons for anonymity. Normally Lisa interpreted the gap between them as playing it safe against powers that required touch, but her power told Lisa that it was Skitter trying to give her space.

She would’ve appreciated the sentiment more if the respect for personal boundaries extended to not discreetly placing bugs on the joints of every person in the room.

“Sorry about getting off on the wrong foot. I do legitimately forget how scary bugs can be, and I didn’t think it would freak anyone out.” After the silence went on for a second too long, she extended a hand. It was tipped with metal claws, and backed with a dark grey sort of armor. “Can we start again?”

 _She’s serious_ , Lisa wondered, smile unmoving while she looked at her own reflection in the other woman’s eyes, tinted gold.

_“I’ll be your number one with a bullet_

Before she could think better of it Lisa slapped her palm into Skitter’s, shook it twice, and pulled herself up. “It’s all good, just a little too much all at once.” After discreetly wiping her hand off on her pants and promising to wash it thoroughly once back in the ladies’ room, Lisa jerked her head towards the door. “Now that business is taken care of, want to get a bite to eat and a drink? I like to know a little bit about the people I’m working with, and I don’t think I’ve heard much about you yet.”

“Sure.” The desperation hidden underneath the deadpan delivery almost made Lisa feel guilty, but she consoled herself with the knowledge that dealing with masks meant that preemptive self-defense was well within the rules of engagement. Besides, making nice with the most socially vulnerable mask in the room wasn’t manipulation if you only intended to take advantage of it if things went south, at which point everyone would be looking for trust amidst the storm of backstabbing.

_“A loaded God complex, cock it and pull it.”_

As they stepped back through the secret entrance in the ladies’ room, Lisa pulled off her mask. “My name’s Lisa. Lisa Wilborne. Yours?”

After a moment, Skitter’s clawed fingers came up and rolled up the mask. Underneath was a plain-looking face, a wide mouth, and large eyes squinting at nothing.

“One sec,” she said. After a moment of fumbling, Skitter pulled a pair of wire-rimmed glasses out of her pocket, fit the arms over hear ears, and met Lisa’s gaze.

 _She looks a lot less terrifying when you see how scared she is_ , Lisa thought, just before the woman spoke.

“Taylor. Taylor Hebert. I hope we can be friends.”


	2. Blinding Lights

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Best listened to with "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd playing in the background.

What was Tennessee Whiskey?

Step one: make bourbon. Except not really, because the Tennessee natives fought at least two legal battles _before_ the Prohibition to make sure it was _Tennessee Whiskey_ and _not_ bourbon, but practically speaking you needed some strong, unaged bourbon. Lisa personally didn’t give a shit about what a bunch of backwood hicks thought about their fine and storied tradition of alcoholism, but the combination of powers and men who were fundamentally unable to shut the fuck up was a _hell_ of a drug.

_“I been tryna call_

_“I been on my own for long enough_

_“Maybe you can show me how to love_

_“Maybe...”_

Step two: light it on fire. Not before you also soaked a pile of maple wood with it, but then light it one fire. Gather the charcoal, pack it into a massive vat, then filter more bourbon through the resulting mess, at which point it goes into a barrel to age for four to twelve years, guarded by a lot of twitchy guys with more bullets than sense. Officially speaking the company was supposed to stop operations in the wake of the Eighteenth Amendment, but the day the inheritor of Jack Daniel’s legacy rolled over for the government was the day the sky fell and England sank into the sea, so instead the government inspectors got a bribe of fifty bucks a month and a bottle of exceptionally shitty booze with a fancy label, the latter of which brought more good will amongst the white collar types than any number of greenbacks could.

_“I’m going through withdrawals_

_“You don’t even have to do too much_

_“You can turn me on with just a touch_

_“Baby...”_

Step three: find one of the nicer bars in New York, as for Ol’ Number Seven, and fork over either however-the-fuck-much they ask for or a snake-charm pendant that’s code for ‘give this person drinks or less your entire fire-trap-of-a-speakeasy is going to go up in flames,’ tell them to skip the ice, and enjoy the taste of liquid maplewood smoke wrapping around your tongue like a blackberry vine as you pig out on meat pies, pretzels, and the other local delicacies, luxuriating in the taste of good meat, fried bread, and other thick foods as your life collapses around you.

“Lisa.”

_“I look around and Sin City’s cold and empty...”_

Lisa stared into her glass, wishing that the fluid would transform into something significantly more poisonous and lethal that ninety-proof liquor. “Taylor.”

_“No one’s around to judge me...”_

The stool next to Lisa creaked, and every other stool _groaned_ as the patrons got up, a _pitter-patter_ of leather shoes and awkward coughs masking the muttered curses as the room emptied, save for a single woman behind the bar who’d decided to go rub her spotless bar towel across a spotless patch of bar top that just happened to be as far away from Lisa and her new companion as possible. 

Credit where credit was due, the band didn’t stop, even when they picked up a buzzing accompaniment.

_“I can’t see clearly when you’re gone...”_

“Hey, Skitter,” Lisa said, twisting in her seat and putting on a smile. Trying to. She let her eyes slide off the hunched shoulders and clenched hands and onto the cut-glass tumbler held under the light of an honest-to-god chandelier, glowing like the child of an amber and a diamond, and let her power passively recalculate the amount of liquor left in her glass, how much it’d been diluted by the slowly-melting ice cubes that were most of the night old, and how much more she could pour down her throat without waking up with a worse migraine than usual.

The answer to the last question was two fewer than she’d had so far, so Lisa shrugged and tilted her head back, swallowing down the last of her courage. Sour hit her tongue, so abused by the night and bitter that it didn’t even curl, merely a vehicle for the warmth that dribbled down afterwards.

In for a penny.

_“I said ooh, I’m blinded by the lights...”_

“We helped Coil kidnap a kid.”

Lisa swallowed, savoring the muted flood of heat that seeped through her bones like a Sunday morning under the covers, and didn’t say anything.

“Tell me you didn’t know.”

Lisa tapped her glass against the bar top, and when that didn’t summon the bartender reached over, grabbed the bottle of burgundy promise by the neck, and poured herself what felt like a scary amount of the one thing home had been good for besides blues.

“I did.”

_“No I can’t sleep until I feel your touch...”_

The countertop screamed where five talons that had laid open more than one goon’s face made their fury known. **“What the _fuck_?”**

“I didn’t think it was that bad!” Lisa shouted back, knowing it was the wrong move, knowing that there weren't any ways for this to go right, keeping her head bowed because she couldn’t bring herself to look up at Taylor, forcing her power to try and find something plausible which wasn’t also a lie. “I thought it was just a ransom gig! Her uncle’s the mayor, so maybe he leans on him to embezzle some campaign cash, or maybe he uses this to find something on a Congressman to make sure the repeal doesn’t go through, or maybe—”

This time the buzzing roared over the piano, a hacksaw over chalkboard, and metal flashed where Taylor ripped five long, ragged gouges into previously-lacquered wood. **“Or maybe your boss was keeping a little girl in a cage and feeding her dope!”**

_“I said ooh, I’m drowning in the night...”_

Lisa took as large a swallow as her palette would allow, and then coughed a little as the alcohol burned her on the inhale. “Or maybe Coil is fucking a kid.”

_“Oh, when I’m like this, you’re the one I trust...”_

She glared to the side, nostrils still flaring slightly where a careless inhalation had brought a more-than-pleasant amount of the fumes into her nostrils. “And he was your boss too.”

As soon as the words left her lips Lisa wanted to break her cup against the edge of the counter, jam the ragged glass blade into her neck, and hope that a prompt suicide would earn her some forgiveness.

The buzzing stopped.

The band didn’t.

“I’m going to leave.”

Lisa nodded, turning to face the mirror on the back of the bar and trying to ignore the barrage of information her power was jamming into her ear. “Alright.”

“I mean it.”

“I know that.”

Taylor didn’t.

_“I’m running out of time...”_

A plan began to form in Lisa’s head.

_“‘Cause I can see the sun light up the sky...”_

“I don’t like Coil.”

_“So I hit the road in overdrive...”_

“I fucking hate him, actually.”

_“Baby...”_

“I’m trying to kill him.”

**“How?”**

Nailed it.

The chorus came back in, and Lisa took the opportunity to re-cap the bottle of liquor, push her glass away, and stand up. There was more sway to the motion than she intended, but it wasn’t hard to turn that into a sensuous swing of the hips instead of a drunken stumble.

(Thank god for repressed homosexuality.)

“He pays people. Not in cash. Checks. I’m slowly tracking down the banks he uses to manage their accounts. It changes every few weeks, but each time I’m finding them faster.”

_“I'm just walking by to let you know_

“It’s a long shot, needs a lot of things to go right—”

_“I can never say it on the phone_

“—and if you don’t want to stick around for it I get that, I wouldn’t either—”

_“I will never let you go this time..._

“—but maybe don’t say goodbye forever, okay?”

The buzzing stopped.

Her power told her to turn around, to make eye contact and play on Taylor’s insecurity. So many unspoken promises could be made with the right angling of the eyebrows, could be implied without being committed to, handcuffs made of thread that didn’t really mean anything unless you desperately wanted them to, like Taylor world. She talked big game, lots about ‘fighting back against federalist tyranny’ and ‘siding with the underdog,’ but at the end of the day the Undersiders were a social club first and source of income second for her. She needed people the way Lisa needed information, needed to be recognized and understood, and if the inklings Lisa had inadvertently picked up about her civilian life were anything to go off of she’d literally been the source of almost every affirming comment the woman had heard in the past six months.

_I’m not that much of a bitch_ , Lisa thought, then grimaced.

Given which side of the moral equation she was on, maybe she was.

When Lisa turned around, Taylor was gone.

_“I said, ooh, I'm blinded by the lights...”_

_“No, I can't sleep until I feel your touch...”_


	3. Where Am I At

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Taylor comes back from the front.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Best read with "Where am I At?" by MAX (fear Witt Lowry) playing in the background, with either Glenfiddich's 12 or a port at hand.

> _Where am I at these days_
> 
> _Now that you're gone?_
> 
> _Where am I at these days_
> 
> _When you don't come home?_
> 
> The war had changed everything.

The streets were the same. The rhythm of the city, trains and cars and pedestrians, each trying not to kill one another while also getting to where they needed to go, was the same. Hell, the speak-easies were the same, even after booze had been legalized, because no one but the hard-core alcoholics went to the bar for the sole purpose of getting drunk, and by the time the government decided that waging a war on two fronts was impossible the doors hidden behind bookcases and esoteric passwords and drinking whiskey in tea had already become inseparable from intoxication.

Instead, the change had been a change in tone. It’d been the quiet perusal of newspapers, of universal grousing about the Jerries and silent searching of obituaries, either far too much togetherness or a far-too-pure isolation maintained so you didn’t infect anyone else with your misery because when you knew what worrying about getting a coffin back from the front instead of a letter you didn’t wish that shit on anyone else at all. It’d been in the complete absence of work, above broad or under the table, at midnight, because that was when the radio announced what had happened in Europe that day (or the day previous if communications were shot, as they often were) and everybody knew someone across the Atlantic worth stopping their day for.

“She’s here.”

> _Hardly got out of bed this morning_
> 
> _Felt this rush, yeah, it lingers and I can't ignore it_

Lisa sniffed the scotch in her hand, savoring the smokey, honeyed scent of proper, Scottish alcohol, then threw the rest of the glass back. “Well I better go out and meet her then, shouldn’t I?”

> _'Cause I've been runnin' for so long, long_
> 
> _Yeah, I've been runnin' for so long, long_

She wasn’t the first to meet up with Taylor. That honor went to the actual vets, the ones who’d taken Uncle Sam up on his offer of amnesty, pensions, and patriotism when he came knocking, asking for help against the Nazis. Lisa’d eventually started offering intel on the local branches of the German mafia, and when she let her power loose on some of the more sensational article in the _Times_ she decided that there were some things people could do which actually did justify sponging, purging, and if need be _blasting_ them from the face of the earth, even if everyone without first-hand experience (or a Thinker power) agreed a day later that the speech had perhaps been a little overblown.

> _Where am I at these days_
> 
> _Now that you're gone?_
> 
> _Where am I at these days_
> 
> _When you don't come home?_

Lisa had let Aisha and Rachel have the honor of greeting the returning hero, and spent what felt like an entirely-too-long ten minutes letting them get back together in peace.

Then she stopped being a bitch, pushed open the double doors, and stepped out into the more-legal part of her business.

> _Where am I at?_

It wasn’t hard to see the divide between civilians and soldiers. Only civies, drunk ones, were sitting with their backs to the door. Only the soldiers hunched over their food, even when they were laughing, like it might be taken away at any moment. Only the civilians had dressed up in bright colors, thin cloth, and didn’t have a weapon discreetly stowed away, and only the soldiers flinched every time the door slammed closed.

Lisa would fix that.

> _Yeah, losing you was like losing a part of me_
> 
> _All the pain took it straight to the artery._

And there was Taylor.

Lisa’d seen her in photos. Mug shots, mostly, ones that at first called her a traitor, then a distinguished private, then the leader of a squad, and eventually something closer to a captain out of the pirate comics than a person. She remembered hearing the goons chatter about the front, inventing stories of their own about what The Weaver could do to a tank with nothing more than a couple of wasps and a handful of termites. She remembered thinking about how her friend had become a legend while Tattletale was still little more than one more urban legend of Manhattan, and how she had to stop herself from burning down a newsstand that had painted a mural of blue bugs on it’s back with the caption _We support our Heroes_.

> _Wonder what you would think when you thought of me_
> 
> _Wonder if I could handle your honesty._

Taylor looked up from her conversation with Rachel and Aisha and stood, smiling brightly. “Lisa!”

Lisa smiled back, near-skipping between tables. “Taylor!”

> _Couple things didn't change when you left_
> 
> _I continue to grow, I continue to stress._

Lisa’s power told her that Taylor had her letters.

It told her that she’d read between the lines and understood most of the info dumps on the state of Manhattan.

It told her that she’d been lonely in the woods of Western Germany, away from her friends, and that she hadn’t made any others.

> _I just wish you were here, this was always a fear_
> 
> _No matter how long, never missing you less._

It told Lisa that she’d like seeing Aisha.

It told her that she’d gotten a platonic hug from Rachel.

> _There were so many things that we still had to do_

It told her she hadn’t figured out how to begin approaching Brian.

> _And so many calls that would never go through_

It told her that things were worse than her spies in the PRT could divine.

> _You dealt with a hand that you never would choose_

It told her that Taylor, even now, was falling apart, like a statue made of ceramic and glass, forever looking into the future to the next scariest thing.

> _Woke up from this nightmare, I barely can move_

It told her Taylor hadn’t gotten more than six hours of sleep in a night for months.

> _I remember your smile, your voice and your laugh_

It told her the bags under her eyes weren’t new.

> _Almost do anything just to have that all back_

It told her that Taylor wouldn’t be rejoining the team, and that this really was just a check-in.

> _Now I think about where you might be every time that they ask..._

Then Lisa kissed Taylor and her power finally shut the fuck up.

> _Where am I at these days_
> 
> _Now that you're gone?_

A wolf-whistle brought them back to reality, and Lisa made a mental note to have Aisha murdered.

“Wow,” Taylor said as they parted, Lisa’s arms still wrapped around her shoulders, her arms still wrapped around Lisa.

> _Where am I at these days_
> 
> _When you don't come home?_

Lisa pulled Taylor in for another hug. “It’s been a while, Tay. Don’t think too hard about it,” she lied.

> _My heart's been leakin' so much_
> 
> _The love that you gave, it was more than enough_

Taylor’s arms slid apart, and Lisa managed to retreat before it became awkward.

> _I'm afraid to send you on your way_
> 
> _'Cause nothing 'bout me feels the same_

Her power told her that Taylor still didn’t get it.

> _Feels the same_

_One day_ , Lisa thought, pulling up a chair as Taylor turned to Brian and Elise. She filtered out the nonsense her power gave her about old hurts reigniting there, old questions and doubts surfacing once again.

> _Where am I at these days_
> 
> _Now that you're gone?_

“How long do you have with us?” she asked, brushing her hair behind an ear, breaking off Taylor’s painfully awkward conversation with her ex’s new beau.

Taylor shot her a grateful look. “Six hours. Then I need to get on a train to DC. They’re making me a Colonel. Wanted to give Dad the good news.”

Lisa smiled as more details of the plan spilled out, already counting off the minutes until Taylor once more fell out of her life.

> _Where am I at these days_

Lisa wasn’t ready for the Undersiders to die.

> _Now that you're gone?_

She wasn’t ready to hear about her best friend becoming yet another government boot-licker.

> _Where am I at these days_

She damn sure wasn’t ready to give up on the thing in her life that she couldn’t justify with a word other than _want_.

> _When you don't come home?_

Taylor would come back, for real, and when she did Lisa would be waiting.

> _Where am I at?_


End file.
